The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime.

But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today's standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed.

The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an "aunt," "Operational Case Jentzsch," presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German poet who defected to the West in 1976), places ("church"), and meetings ("by post, by phone, meeting in Hungary").

Gary Bruce, an associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo and the author of "The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi," helped me decode the graphic and other files. I was surprised at how crude the surveillance was. "Their main surveillance technology was mail, telephone, and informants," Bruce said.

Another file revealed a low-level surveillance operation called an IM-vorgang aimed at recruiting an unnamed target to become an informant. (The names of the targets were redacted; the names of the Stasi agents and informants were not.) In this case, the Stasi watched a rather boring high school student who lived with his mother and sister in a run-of-the-mill apartment. The Stasi obtained a report on him from the principal of his school and from a club where he was a member. But they didn't have much on him — I've seen Facebook profiles with far more information.

A third file documented a surveillance operation known as an OPK, for Operative Personenkontrolle, of a man who was writing oppositional poetry. The Stasi deployed three informants against him but did not steam open his mail or listen to his phone calls. The regime collapsed before the Stasi could do anything further.

I also obtained a file that contained an "observation report," in which Stasi agents recorded the movements of a forty-year-old man for two days — September 28 and 29, 1979. They watched him as he dropped off his laundry, loaded up his car with rolls of wallpaper, and drove a child in a car "obeying the speed limit," stopping for gas and delivering the wallpaper to an apartment building. The Stasi continued to follow the car as a woman drove the child back to Berlin.

The Stasi agent appears to have started following the target at 4:15 p.m. on a Friday evening. At 9:38 p.m., the target went into his apartment and turned out the lights. The agent stayed all night and handed over surveillance to another agent at 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning. That agent appears to have followed the target until 10:00 p.m. From today's perspective, this seems like a lot of work for very little information.

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]]>compare and contrasthttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140228/15025026393Fri, 28 Jun 2013 07:15:33 PDTFormer East German Stasi Officer Expresses Admiration For, Dismay At US Government's Surveillance CapabilitiesTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130627/15455123642/former-east-german-stasi-officer-expresses-admiration-dismay-us-governments-surveillance-capabilities.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130627/15455123642/former-east-german-stasi-officer-expresses-admiration-dismay-us-governments-surveillance-capabilities.shtml
While Germany's security agencies seem to be impressed with the size of our surveillance coverage, the German people are understandably a bit more perturbed. The divided Germany of the not-too-distant past saw many people on the eastern side of the Wall spend a great deal of time being surveilled by their countrymen, and recent developments echo that past all too well.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

As was pointed out late last year, the US government has more data on the average American citizen than the East German Stasi, a division created solely to surveil German citizens. This was noted before the recent leaks, meaning what's been gathered by the NSA, FBI, etc. is exponentially greater than previously estimated.

The Stasi's surveillance was much more targeted than our current efforts, though this was mainly due to technical limitations, rather than out of any concern for German citizens.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

Today, there are no such limitations. Everything can be gathered, stored and sorted through at these agencies' convenience. How much has been collected still remains a mystery. FOIA requests sent to the NSA attempting to discover what's included have been denied, with the agency predictably stating that confirming, denying or releasing any information would do "exceedingly grave damage to national security."

Former East Germans, however, have been granted access to their personal Stasi files. Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy advisor, obtained his recently. Over 15 years, the Stasi put together 9,000 pages on his activities. Stefan Wolfe, who curates the East German Museum, also had a look at his file and found it to be mostly comprised of routine, everyday life.

“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

The author of this McClatchy piece refers to the Stasi's obsessive detailing of day-to-day activities as the "banality of evil." When an agency makes an effort to track everything about someone, actions or words that normally mean nothing are attributed significance by those performing the surveillance. "It has to mean something, otherwise we wouldn't be tracking it." But grabbing everything means ending up with a whole lot of nothing, as Wolfe points out.

“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”

Even the former Stasi agent, despite his begrudging admiration, finds the US surveillance efforts troubling.

Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

You can't justify harvesting this much data if you're not going to use it. And if you can't find anything worth using it for, you'll connect the all-important "dots" until it resembles something... anything. Anything that departs even minimally from the norm becomes suspicious. Using encryption? Probably a threat. Parking too far away from a hotel? Potential terrorist. Find the local water a little tough to drink? Let's get that file started. Unwittingly engage an undercover FBI agent in conversation? Chances are you'll soon be converted into a terrorist.

The US, after years of acting as the world's policeman, has finally revealed itself to instead be the unmarked van that's constantly parked just down the world's street. (And the unexplained "clicking noise" on every US citizens' phone call...) It has the sympathy of several of the world's governments, many of which are directly benefitting from the US's surveillance infrastructure or hoping to construct one of their own. But the citizens of the world are more wary, especially those that who've already been subjected to intrusive, non-stop surveillance by their own governments.

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]]>NSA's-to-do-list:-'impress-Stasi'...-check!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130627/15455123642Wed, 3 Oct 2012 13:13:00 PDTThe US Government Today Has More Data On The Average American Than The Stasi Did On East GermansMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121003/10091120581/us-government-today-has-more-data-average-american-than-stasi-did-east-germans.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121003/10091120581/us-government-today-has-more-data-average-american-than-stasi-did-east-germans.shtmlquite aggressive in spying on Americans. It has been helped along by a court system that doesn't seem particularly concerned about the 4th Amendment and by the growing ability of private companies to have our data and to then share it with the government at will. Either way, in a
radio interview, Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin (who's been one of the best at covering the surveillance state in the US) made a simple observation that puts much of this into context: the US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans. And, of course, as we've already seen, much of that data seems to be collected illegally with little oversight... and with absolutely no security benefit.

To be fair, part of the reason for why this is happening is purely technical/practical. While the Stasi likely wanted more info and would have loved to have been able to tap into a digitally connected world like we have today, that just wasn't possible. The fact that we have so much data about us in connected computers makes it an entirely different world. So, from a practical level, there's a big difference.

That said, it still should be terrifying. Even if there are legitimate technical reasons for why the government has so much more data on us, it doesn't change the simple fact (true both then and now) that such data is wide open to abuse, which inevitably happens. The ability of government officials to abuse access to information about you for questionable purposes is something that we should all be worried about. Even those who sometimes have the best of intentions seem to fall prey to the temptation to use such access in ways that strip away civil liberties and basic expectations of privacy. Unfortunately, the courts seem to have very little recognition of the scope of the issue, and there's almost no incentive for Congress (and certainly the executive branch) to do anything at all to fix this.